Jacobin

Janeese Lewis George, the democratic socialist who just won DC’s mayoral primary, talks tenants’ rights, gentrification, and what home rule can’t protect against.

Lucrecia Martel’s latest film, Nuestra Tierra, the director’s first documentary, juxtaposes the fragility of colonial narratives with the strength of indigenous peoples’ collective identity formed through fighting the dispossession of their land.

Since October 7, academic institutions have applied overt and covert pressure to discourage Holocaust and genocide scholars from criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Still, many academics are organizing new networks to defend free inquiry.

Online gambling operators are no longer selling the promise of luxury but the promise of stability. Through fake Reddit accounts, they peddle stories of groceries bought and rent paid, all supposedly made possible by a lucky break.

The Declaration of Independence has been quoted by abolitionists, suffragists, socialists, civil rights activists, and the Black Panthers. Why should conservatives get to own it now?

In a speech marking the country’s 250th anniversary, socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani lays out his vision of a United States of America for the many, not the few.

American exceptionalism has always had an absurd and self-serving character to it. But any pretense justifying it has collapsed in the face of Donald Trump’s cruelty and oligarchic corruption.

The Constitution didn’t stop Trump — it made his reign possible.

Even the Founding Fathers had second thoughts about the system they had created.

As the US celebrates its 250th, it has begun to resemble the decadent Spanish Empire it replaced: producing nothing while collecting rents, sacrificing its interior to enrich a bloated elite, and embracing exclusionary nationalism to exploit its underclass.

After the Trump administration denied visas to the Iranian team, its participation in the 2026 World Cup seemed unlikely. Mexico’s decision to host the players was rooted in its shared struggle for sovereignty in the face of US aggression.

Jonathan Chait’s Atlantic essay claims the Democratic Socialists of America has betrayed the legacy of its founder, Michael Harrington. It gets DSA’s history, and what the organization is today, wrong.

In his dissenting Supreme Court opinion this week, Clarence Thomas argued for a version of the idea that citizenship is a matter of ancestral lineage — a position not unlike that of Israel, which assigns citizenship on the basis of Jewish descent.

For generations, historians have downplayed the American Revolution as a squabble between elites. But the revolution unleashed egalitarian forces its architects could neither control nor contain.

Americans have celebrated Thomas Paine’s Common Sense for generations. What gets lost in the fanfare is how common sense is not some eternal repository of political wisdom, but something continually reshaped by democratic debate, argument, and persuasion.

The leading black intellectual and freedom fighter W. E. B. Du Bois was a longtime committed socialist and, eventually, a Marxist — commitments that were central to his life and work. Liberals are dead set on suppressing this aspect of his legacy.

The feminist insight that personal life is political is complicated by neoliberalism, which casts political problems as matters of personal virtue. This moralization of personal conduct can displace the collective action needed to transform society.

The last of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, workhouses for “morally wayward” women, closed in 1996. Since then, the institutions’ many horrors have come to light, but misinformation has also been endemic. A new book provides a granular, factual account.

Americans used to fight for constitutional change — and not just in the Supreme Court chamber. Jill Lepore talked to Jacobin about the decline of the amendment process and the rise of judicial power.

Could democratic socialism become the brand of a new generation of political actors — not just on the fringe, not just in New York City, but across the country?